Topping the list of seasonal gifts would have to be the trio of custom art pieces created for me by Karli, my significant other. Karli is a talented and creative artist in her spare time, and wanted to give me something unique for our first Christmas together. Accordingly, she purchased a well-worn copy of a 50's young adult adventure-fantasy novel entitled The Sky Pirates, and used a few select pages as canvases for suitably whimsical illustrations.
Karli also presented me with a 75th Anniversary edition of The Hobbit in hard cover. It's a marvelous little treasure featuring Tolkien's illustrations, along with his original wraparound dustcover design, printed for the first time to match his artwork - originally the sun and the dragon were not reproduced in red due to printing costs. All in all, a wonderful set of presents - thanks very much, my love!
There's been a cascade effect from my friend Colin's present: Fallout 4, the latest and greatest game from Bethesda. In order to run this state-of-the-art open-world role-playing software, it was necessary to upgrade my copy of Windows 10 to a 64-bit version, and double the RAM on my PC platform. Fortunately, I received almost exactly the right amount of Amazon** gift cards from Karli's relatives to cover the cost of the RAM, with the balance of the money going to one of the items from my Geekmas shopping list - Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice in trade paperback.
As I've said before, I do love a good time travel story, and this Christmas my friend Chris added to my collection with The Time Traveller's Almanac, a collection of classic time travel stories. Some of them are well know favourites, like Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder or Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's Vintage Season, whereas others break new ground for me.
And my belated Secret Santa gift? A TARDIS teapot - certainly a great addition to my collection of Doctor Who items, and it goes very nicely with the mug that Santa gave me in 2013, but it did make it obvious that Santa didn't see my request for episodes over merchandise. Hmmm...perhaps next year I'll just send him a letter, Santa is probably still using the old school approach to gift requests.
- Sid
* No pun intended.
** To my mild surprise, the Amazon.ca third party vendor that I found offered a very competitive price on memory chips. That being said, I'm hoping that I didn't order the wrong ones, there are an awful lot of variables in terms of speed and configuration - we'll know for sure when they arrive early next week. I also gather that there may be some issues in terms of configuration, based on various comments on the process that I've read. Wish me luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment